3 Package Management

The purpose of GNU Guix is to allow users to easily install, upgrade, and remove software packages, without having to know about their build procedure or dependencies. Guix also goes beyond this obvious set of features.

This chapter describes the main features of Guix, as well as the package management tools it provides. Two user interfaces are provided for routine package management tasks: A command-line interface described below (see guix package), as well as a visual user interface in Emacs described in a subsequent chapter (see Emacs Interface).